


Winter Wars

by semele



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-08 12:32:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5497181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semele/pseuds/semele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Arkers return from Mount Weather to Camp Jaha, they don’t exactly find a happily ever after waiting there for them. But they might just try to get one anyway.</p><p>(AKA The Fic About All The Things Season Three Won’t Give Me. No, it's not s3 compatible. Contains some Raven/Wick.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A weight to being on the ground

**Author's Note:**

> Story inspired by a discussion with captaindove. There is nothing here to warrant the rating yet, but let's be real, there will be... 
> 
> Have fun spying a gratuitous The National quote in the first chapter ;).

Raven wakes up in a strange bed, surrounded by noise and the smell of antiseptic, and if it wasn’t for the heaviness she definitely feels in her limbs, she’d think she’s miraculously back on the Ark. There is, Raven knows, a weight to being on the ground, something the manufactured gravity she grew up with never got quite right, and so now she knows exactly where she is, despite the familiar smell and faint clicks of metal on metal. It’s foolish, she’ll realize later, because what she should’ve picked up on first is the deafening lack of machine hum in the air, but maybe she’s used to that by now, so changed and far removed from herself that her engines aren’t a part of her anymore.

No matter.

She drifts back into sleep soon, and the part of her mind tuned in to danger wonders if they – whoever _they_ might be – are feeding her some herbal sleeping concoction in lieu of actual painkillers. That would explain the fuzzy quality the world has around her whenever she comes to, people changing randomly on her bedside chair, Monty, Bellamy, Wick, Sinclair. She can’t be sure if they’re really here, but she thinks yes, she wouldn’t have imagined them all. Why would she? It’s not like she needs people anyway.

Her grief after Finn doesn’t really hit her yet, but it’s skulking around at the back of her head, and she senses it on her fingertips when she reaches out without thinking, sorrow waited, sorrow won, or some other poetic bullshit, Raven’s hand falling back empty on her questionably clean sheets. At one moment, she thinks someone catches it before it drops, and rubs his thumb against her knuckles, encouraging and strong, but when she wakes up, the chair is empty, and so maybe it was all her imagination.

Then the sleeping draught wears off.

“You have a puncture wound to the thigh,” Jackson explains as if she didn’t already know. There is a hole in her leg that goes all the way to the bone. “Most of the pain comes from the swelling, so once that’s gone, you should be okay.”

Which, to Raven’s knowledge, roughly translates into: I can’t do an x-ray, and I would pray that nothing is broken, but I’m too busy hovering over Abby’s bed at the moment.

Abby’s bed, which is right next to Raven’s, and that’s how she learns what happened while she was being carried into Camp Jaha; learns about an empty chair where Clarke should be, and about the mess that ensued. Next time Bellamy comes to visit her, he’s wearing a uniform to match the bruises on his face, and just like that, the world is back on its axis, spinning from one clusterfuck into an even worse one, and there is nothing Raven can do about it.

Jackson lets her go two days later, and since she can’t live alone until she can walk again, Kyle takes her to his.

***

The uniforms they get come from Mount Weather, and Bellamy doesn’t bat an eye when he puts on his for the first time, pristine and crisp, all shining buckles and smooth cuffs. He handles it carefully as if it wasn’t his, and he was just preparing it for someone else; as if he was worried he could ruin it with his bare hands. If it bothers him where it comes from, he never says a word. It’s not like there’s someone listening anyway.

His hands, it seems, are sore and slightly swollen, and at first he’s annoyed that his brain is playing some bullshit Lady Macbeth tricks on him, but then he realizes that this is simply the cold, and that his skin, unused as it is to handling the elements, is taking it a lot harder than he thought it would. Walking around in gloves and a scarf only feels funny for the first few days, and anyway, Bellamy has bigger problems than the fact that he looks like some character taken straight out of an old Earth movie.

Or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he just has quite an opinion of himself. Like: I am a leader and my people need me, they need me to heal and to thrive.

( _I bear it,_ he doesn’t think, _so they don’t have to._ )

His reality, however, are drills and leaps, and mind-numbing gate shifts that leave him chilled to the bone. He keeps expecting that someone will speak up, throw it in his face what he did, and float him like he deserves, but it keeps not happening, even though people keep throwing him scared glances when they think he’s not looking, obviously worried what he might do if they cross him. It’s as if everyone in Camp Jaha, including him, was too much of a coward to demand justice for the lives taken so that they might all live.

On the first day, he still has enough resolve in him to stand up for himself; to bark at Kane’s praise, and shake his hand off his shoulder before storming away to sit by Raven’s infirmary bed. But then his moral outrage drowns in mundanities and excuses, _they need me_ or maybe _I can’t_ until it becomes watered down and petty, reduced to snappish answers he gives O, and to vigils he keeps at Raven’s side.

Then Raven gets discharged, and he keeps running leaps when he’s told, like a good little soldier.

Kane learns his lesson, it seems, or at least he doesn’t try praising Bellamy again, but he still keeps him close, close enough to have an eye on him, not that Bellamy minds. He isn’t plotting anything. He’s had enough plotting to last him a lifetime, and he doesn’t care who will lead the Council now. He’s tired, and chilled, and irritable, and as for his _people_ , he’s done fooling himself that convincing a bunch of beaten down kids to do whatever the hell they want makes him any kind of a leader.

So on a day when he wants to feel better about himself, he simply picks up a carrying pole and two buckets, and brings Raven some water from the stream.

He does it ineptly, of course, and by the time he reaches her quarters, he’s shivering from the water he managed to splash all over his clothes like an idiot, and so he doesn’t have it in him to pretend that he was just passing by, or that he accidentally brought more than he himself could use. He knocks, and when she yells out a “Come in!”, he opens the door, and steps in with one of the bucket without a word of a comment. Raven is resting on a pile of blankets, her cot big enough to fit two people, except it’s now cluttered with tools, and wires, and scraps of metal, some of which look suspiciously like her brace.

“How are you feeling?” he asks as he places one of his buckets in the corner of the room. “You’ve got enough firewood?”

Raven nods slowly.

“We’re all set,” she says, her voice hoarse as if she hasn’t spoken to anyone all day. “Did you need anything?”

She sounds hostile as if out of habit, no real sting to it, and suddenly Bellamy wants to hold her hand like he did when she was sleeping in the infirmary, wants to sit by her and keep watch, and he has no idea how to ask her without sounding weird, so he just shakes his head.

“What are you making?” he asks awkwardly. Raven sighs.

“Replacing a hinge. So what, you just brought me water because you were bored? I haven’t seen you in a week.”

He shrugs.

“It’s a bucket of water. Do I need a reason?”

She looks at him like she was going to say yes, or maybe toss him a screwdriver, and ask him to loosen a stubborn bolt she isn’t strong enough to get, but in the end, she bites her lip and stays silent, awkward and strangely subdued, as if she only just remembered what he did, and that she’s supposed to be scared of him.

He has another drill that afternoon, and then he runs around camp until he can’t breathe, until his arms and legs are on fire, his gun heavy at his belt, just like when he was eighteen, good job, cadet Blake. When he’s walking home afterwards, for a few blissful seconds he is so tired he feels completely numb.

The ground around his door is covered in labored, heavy footprints, and inside, Bellamy finds a small package on his bed, a handful of nuts and an apple wrapped in a piece of clean cloth.


	2. A glitch

Kyle isn’t too happy with her when he realizes she left her bed against doctors’ orders, and the fight they get into as soon as she hobbles back into his quarters in the wreckage of the Ark is the opposite of pretty. It’s what they’ve been doing ever since she left the infirmary, and on some level, Raven knows just how right he is about her. She’s being stubborn and stupid, closed-off and mean, that’s true, that’s all true, he’s right to call her that.

But his words chafe even if they’re true, and every time they fight, Raven feels her gorge rise until all she can do is cry, then cry some more, no, not again; she’s sick and tired of crying, and so is he, she can see it in his face every time they fight. Maybe he’s right. Maybe he should be sick of this mess he got saddled with.

So for the next four days, she tries to be good; stays in their bed, and only fiddles with things that are clean, so she doesn’t have to stand over the basin to scrub her fingers afterwards. She does her best to notice the good moments as they come – the way Kyle rubs the back of her neck in the evening, and the way he laughs as he tries to cheer her up with some dumb story from camp. She can be good, she decides. She can fix this. It’s just some post-traumatic bullshit, like the stuff she learned about in her Zero-G training – a glitch, her mind screeching and jumping before it becomes well-oiled again. Just a glitch, and there is no glitch under God’s blue sky that Raven Reyes can’t fix.

On day five she dissolves into tears over nothing, and one of her sobs must be louder than she suspects, because suddenly Miller sticks his head into her tent, takes one look at her surroundings, calls for someone clearly standing behind him, and helps her walk out.

Raven spends the day in Monty’s tiny workshop located in a tent pitched a few feet away from the Ark, both of them quiet as they sort through seeds, nuts and saplings brought in by the people who were foraging in the woods. She knows she isn’t much help, her knowledge of plants rudimentary at best, but she has a pair of good eyes, and Monty is a good teacher, even if his instructions today are quiet and brief. She has no idea why Miller brought her here of all places, where her first choice would be somewhere with screwdrivers, but other workshops are loud and busy, and maybe he just guessed right that she wouldn’t visit any of them with her eyes still red and swollen.

Octavia sneaks her back home before Kyle can even notice that she was gone, and for one day, all’s right in the world.

***

For some reason, Bellamy finds himself reluctant to eat the food Raven left him; not because he doesn’t want it, but because he does. It feels good to hold the small package in his hand, or see it by his bed when he wakes up. He wants to keep it, and that’s something he recognizes all too well, or so he tells himself. He’s found himself wanting to keep food instead of eating it many a time in his past.

But while Bellamy Blake might be a sentimental fool, he’s not a wasteful one, and so he finally eats the apple after two days, then the nuts over the next few. It’s how he usually deals with food; spreads it thin, into tiny portions scattered around the day so that there is always a reserve, something he can keep or share. There is talk among the guards that Monty is organizing a proper greenhouse together with some of the engineers, and once he does, there will be food aplenty, but for now, Bellamy can’t quite find it in himself to change his old habits. Not that he thinks about it too much.

What he does think about, and more than he reasonably should, is the piece of cloth Raven’s gift came in. It’s clearly a rag, torn off something bigger in a way that makes Bellamy’s teeth grit in annoyance, but washed clean carefully, not a speck of dirt left on the fabric. What he should do is leave it alone, and keep it until he inevitably needs a patch in his shirt or pants. That’s exactly the plan.

Which is why, once the last nut is gone, he finds himself fashioning a needle out of a small piece of wire he found in the wreckage, pulling a long thread out of the bottom of his shirt, and spending every last minute of daylight squinting over the damn rag, and securing the frayed edge of the scrap until it starts to roughly resemble a handkerchief. 

The next time he brings Raven water right before his shift, and finds her quarters empty, he’s tempted to take the handkerchief, and use it as an excuse to look for her, and give it to her in thanks, but in the end, he just leaves it on the bed. There is no point bothering her with this. She surely has her hands full.

***

The charade lasts for a few days: Raven wakes up at Kyle’s side, kisses him good morning, and smiles, but as soon as he’s gone to work, one of her friends shows up, and helps her drag herself to Monty’s. She grows to like the silence of his workshop, and she likes Monty, too, even though he’s changed – closed off and shaky, quiet between sudden outbursts of frantic activity. She never asks him or Miller what happened inside the Mountain, because fair is fair. They never tell her to finally get her shit together, either.

When Monty asks if she’d like to design a greenhouse with him, she doesn’t think about it twice.

He comes home with an armful of sketches to look through after dinner, and for the first time in weeks, she feels all the glitches in her head disappear, leaving a machine that’s a little worse for wear, but oiled up quite well, and running smoothly, like clockwork. She’ll need the greenhouse to be big, she decides, because they need to grow a lot of food in a small window of time, before ground freezes beneath them, and leaves them starving. That would require every single working solar from the wreckage, and even the broken ones could be used as building blocks if she can patch them up well enough. She doesn’t exactly need glass, he just needs a big enough place built of something than can sustain a steady temperature as Monty…

Nevermind Monty. Because Kyle is sitting on their empty bed, face red and twisted in anger, and suddenly Raven has much bigger problems than regulating humidity.

Octavia is still standing beside her, one arm around her waist to secure her on her feet, but instead of stepping back when Kyle makes a snarky comment about sneaking around and lying, she snaps at him like he deserves it, like he’s the one in the wrong, like Raven doesn’t need his help, like he isn’t essential to her very survival. Then there is that glitch, coming back with a loud screech, or maybe Raven is the one who’s screaming something horrid until people start gathering around them, until guards come running in, ready to break up the fight.

She doesn’t recognize one of the guards as Bellamy until he stoops to help her gather up her things.

***

He has a night shift anyway, so it seems logical to put Raven in his bed for the time being. Other guards shake their heads like this is all unnecessary, so much fuss over a simple shouting match, but O insists that Raven needs a place to cool down at the very least, and Bellamy doesn’t argue. It’s not like he heard what they were fighting about.

But he still can’t take his mind off that fight, or other fights that keep happening all over camp, his people front and center of them. Before Raven and O screaming bloody murder at Wick, there was that horrific fight between Monty and Jasper, then Monroe getting herself handcuffed after she snapped at a guard, and endless squabbles O has with everyone who as much as looks at her funny. Words like _volatile_ and _trouble_ are flying around freely among the adults, and Bellamy can’t help but hear and file it all in his head, his people, his responsibility, except it’s not like he can fool people into thinking he knows how to take care of them. Not anymore.

But maybe he can at least do _something_ , so he swings by the kitchen on his way from the gates in the morning, picks up Raven’s ration, and heads back to his place.

She’s wide awake when he arrives, and in the process of getting herself out of bed, giving him the first chance since Mount Weather to actually see the effects of her injuries. And five seconds is enough for him to quickly walk to the corner of the tent, and pick up Raven’s brace that some idiot clearly left out of her reach.

“Here,” he says quietly, and goes down on his haunches to help her put it on. “I brought you your food, so grab a bite before you go to Monty’s.”

“I need to go home,” she says with a grimace. “And I think I bled on your sheets.”

He shrugs.

“I was gonna wash them anyway. Is it your leg?”

“Yeah, it keeps… Jackson says it’s normal, and it’ll heal faster if I stop putting weight on it, but… Nevermind. Leave that, I can do my own damned buckles.”

He moves away without comment, not really sure what to say. Thank you for the food? Have you found my gift? Ah yes. Clearly, he’s great at this.

“Do you have to go?” he asks impulsively, then bites his lip. To his surprise, Raven catches his gaze.

“I need to fix this,” she says stubbornly, and she must know he has no clue what she’s talking about, but apparently she doesn’t care. “I can fix this, right? It’s just a fucking glitch. I have to...”

Her eyes are welling up with tears, but she looks more angry than sad, and that reminds him of something; of a girl packing to get far away when she was hurt, and waiting, starved, for a single kind word.

So he reaches for her ration and hands it to her without a word, then sits next to her on his cot.

“What kind of a glitch?” he asks, trying not to let his tiredness show. Raven shakes her head, fingers grasping her food greedily.

“Can I just…” She swallows hard, determined not to look at him. “I have those sketches to look through. Can I do it here? I promise I won’t wake you.”

To his own surprise, Bellamy finds himself smiling in response, and that gets a small smile out of Raven, too, as if they were both remembering something small but bright.

There is a standard issue table and a perfectly good chair in his room, but when he wakes up around noon, Raven is still sitting at the foot of his bed, squinting over Monty’s handwriting. For some inexplicable reason, it makes him feel warm.


	3. A gaping wound

There are some things Raven needs to put together her head now that she managed to cool down, Kyle’s words a bit quieter in her mind. She does most of her thinking while Bellamy sleeps, burrowed under the covers so deeply the bloody stain she left on his blanket is now somewhere around his hip.

Some things she heard last night are impossible to disagree with; she’s stubborn and self-destructive, and a liar to boot, selfish and unable to stick to people who love her. But even though she knows exactly who she is, she still feels like he’s being unfair, or maybe demanding, hard to tell. Say he’s just challenging, but even then, Raven is too beat to want to face yet another challenge.

So when Miller finds her having lunch with Bellamy in amicable silence, she asks him to swing by Wick’s on their way to Monty’s, and once they’re there, they pick up those of her things she didn’t manage to pack in her frenzy last night. Jackson can kiss her ass. She _will_ live alone if she so sees fit.

For now, she drops her shit in Monty’s workshop, and once Miller leaves, she decides to walk to Bellamy’s to pick up the rest all on her own, just to prove to herself that she doesn’t need help. Glitches can kiss her ass as well.

She tries to look around as she walks, considering good spots and materials for a shelter. Most people, like Bellamy, have built something from scraps of the Ark, and furnished with whatever was still usable, not to mention things scouts are starting to bring from Mount Weather. Apparently it belongs to them now by the right of conquest, which would explain why Raven is feeling so fucking victorious.

She finds Bellamy sitting in front of his place, focused on cleaning his shoes regardless of how pointless it is in the everpresent mud, freshly washed sheets hanging around him like curtains. Apparently, he’s been busy.

“You want… What?” he blurts out, confused, when she tells him what she came for. “I thought you were moving out of that place?”

“I am, but come on, I can build my own shelter. This doesn’t mean I’m moving in here.”

There is a moment of silence as he stares at the shoes in his hands, and Raven wants to snort at how profound it all seems, but suddenly Bellamy lifts his gaze to her face, and clears his throat.

“Maybe you should.”

She looks at him like he’s an alien, waiting for him to use all the worst arguments, _you can’t do this_ and _the doctors said_ , but instead he puts his shoes back on the ground, and rests his idle hands on his knees.

“Look, Lincoln keeps saying it’s not safe to live alone in the winter, and the colder it gets, the more I’m thinking maybe he’s right. Don’t waste the time you need for the greenhouse building a shelter. Just… bring the rest of your stuff here, and room with me. I promise I won’t be a bother.”

Raven knows she’ll regret it, but she still sits on the ground next to him, no matter how hard it will be to get up later. He has a point about the greenhouse at the very least, and if he takes his advice from Lincoln, he probably isn’t far off in what he says about the weather, either. Still.

“I cry a lot,” she warns, not really looking at him. She feels his shrug more than she sees it.

“And I keep a gun on the table. Look, I’m not saying it’s perfect, but… You’re good company. It felt good this morning.”

He doesn’t exactly specify what felt good, but he confesses it like a shameful secret, and Raven thinks, looking at his reddened hands, that maybe he has a glitch of his own to think of, and maybe that’s why he’s inviting her to stay.

Or maybe he’s just saying shit he thinks will work on her because Jackson lectured him on her poor, drilled thigh. Either way, it’s working.

“Okay,” she says quietly. “I still have half a day to work with Monty, but I’ll be here as soon as we’re done. I’ll bring some extra blankets. And, Bell? Thank you.”

For some reason, he looks sucker-punched at that, and he doesn’t even move to help her get up, which is probably better for both of them. She only stumbles a little bit, then swears all the way back to Monty’s workshop, but when she finally reaches it, she feels strangely at home. Monty doesn’t comment when he sees her empty-handed, but he does have to talk to her today, discuss the notes she made on his designs, and yes, by the end of the day, she’s sore from sitting on a low stool by his work table, but he’s a bit more like his old self, quick mind and quiet humor, and just that, Raven thinks, is a reward in itself.

But still, she’s beat, and decides to bring nothing but her two blankets, leaving the rest of her stuff under Monty’s custody. There isn’t much here, anyway – just some tools and unfinished projects, and a spare pair of pants she won’t need for another few days. She’s all set.

When she manages to crawl back to Bellamy’s, the first thing she notices is that he improvised a bed for himself on the floor, though “bed” is possibly too generous a word – it’s three not yet fully dry blankets spread on the bare metal floor, with a rolled-up jacket in lieu of a pillow. He actually has the gall to sit there, cross-legged, sewing something furiously as his stripped cot, an actual mattress from the Ark on top of it, is waiting to be covered with Raven’s bedding.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

He looks up at her slowly, ostensibly annoyed that she didn’t simply accept his sleeping arrangement as a fact of life, but when it turns out he can’t stare her down, he simply lowers his gaze back to his sewing, as if attempting to ignore her.

“I’ve slept worse,” he says when she doesn’t move from the threshold. “Close the door, you’re letting the cold in. There is food on the table.”

There is indeed, and Raven brings their two portions to his bed once she drops her blankets there, and pats a spot next to her.

“Come on, don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to take away your bed, especially not for the whole winter.”

He sighs, but drops his sewing on the table, and sits next to her at last, wiping his hands on his clothes before taking his bowl of stew from her.

“I don’t want things to be awkward,” is a thing he actually says with a straight face, and this time, Raven doesn’t stop herself from snorting.

“Why, because we fucked that one time? Grow up.”

He grows quiet at that, as if struggling with something within himself, and Raven watches him intently, wondering if she struck a nerve, and ended their roommate camaraderie before it even fully started. When he looks up at her with a ghost of a smile, looking completely disarmed, she feels a surprise surge of relief that shouldn’t really have a place here, because what was she worried about? That he’d snap? Make some comment that suggests that what they’re discussing here is something other than absolutely innocent? Ridiculous.

“Thank you for the fruit,” is all he says. “I think I’d better… I’ll be right back, I’ll just hang those blankets out again.”

She’s still sitting on the bed when he returns, trying to figure out that latest glitch in her head, so she starts a little when she sees him hovering above her, then picking up their bowls to set them on the table. Hers is empty by now, but his, she notices, is still half-full, not that it’s any of her business to ask about his appetite. He wasn’t lying, there really is a gun on his table, and it looks ridiculous when set right next to his dinner leftovers, but Raven thinks wiser not to comment on that, either.

It’s because she’s had one hell of a day, she decides. She’s just tired.

Yes, tired. That’s why she almost jumps when Bellamy goes down on his haunches in front of her, just like he did this morning, to put his face on level with hers.

“You sure you don’t want me to sleep on the floor? You look, I don’t know. Quiet.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she repeats, trying to make her voice as strong as it was before, because nothing happened, damn it, nothing happened, there is no reason… ”I’m tired, that’s all.”

She tries not to stare as he prepares to bed, but even if she fails, there really isn’t much to look at; they’re halfway through the fall, and Bellamy’s quarters are pretty chilly, no matter how hard he tries to stop the wind from getting in. All he does now is take off his shoes and jacket, and then he lies down behind her in his pants and t-shirt, and props his head up on his hand, clearly waiting for her to take off her brace.

His stare makes her fingers fumble a little, and then, just to be defiant, she gets up and takes off her pants and bra as if to prove that she’s at home here, and if she wants to go to bed just in her boy shorts and shirt, she damn well will do just that, and no one can say a word to her about it. Take that, Kyle.

Bellamy’s cot is narrow, and there is no way to lie down here together without touching, so he simply opens his arms for her, and lets her settle along his body, her back pressed against his stomach, his arm loose around her waist. It’s the only position in which she can get any sleep at all, what with the healing wound in her lower back, and her freshly injured thigh, but with Bellamy, it turns out to be shockingly comforting. He’s a furnace, and she sinks into his warmth eagerly, not fully relaxed, but a little more trusting.

She isn’t even sure how she falls asleep, but she wakes up at dawn feeling damp and sticky, and when she throws back the covers, she realizes in sudden horror that she not only managed to bleed all over her boy shorts, but also stain the blanket. Before she can collect her thoughts, Bellamy stirs behind her, and pushes himself up a bit, alarmed by her frantic movements.

“Is everything… Holy fuck!” His eyes widen for a split second, but then clearly he connects the dots, Raven’s bloodied underwear and no sign of an open wound on her thigh, because to her utter shock, he falls back on the bed with booming laughter.

“I’ll give you a back rub if you help me hang out the blankets,” he manages eventually, still cracked up, and Raven can’t help joining him despite monster cramps, her cheeks still slightly flushed with embarrassment.

She refuses to let him do laundry alone this time, even though it’s one hell of a walk with her wounded leg, and she’s probably more of a burden to him than help, given how he has to carry their blankets in one hand, and use the other to help her keep her footing. She still has trouble kneeling or leaning, so she barely manages to deal with her underwear in the time it takes him to wash the blankets, and the small blood stain on his pant leg for good measure, but it doesn’t really matter. What’s mesmerizing is that he keeps cracking up every time he looks at her, amused, it seems, by how he mistook a simple period for a gaping wound.

It’s the first time she sees him laugh since Mount Weather.


	4. Body heat

Bellamy barely makes it back from the stream in time for his morning shift, and his arms are already aching when the drill starts, what with carrying two soaked blankets and holding Raven up all the way back to camp. Despite the discomfort, he doesn’t really have it in him to be resentful. Last night was the best sleep he’s had in months.

There is, he knows, a kind of intimacy between him and Raven, and it has been there for a while, even if he can’t exactly find a name for it. It’s this strange feeling he has around her, familiarity or maybe friendship. Whatever it is, it made it easy for him to invite her to share his living space; it wasn’t even a conscious decision, but simply an assumption, as if he was a person deserving of this kind of comfort.

Except, he reminds himself between push-ups, that wasn’t about him, and he doesn’t get to be melodramatic now. Raven needed space, and he was the only one of their friends without a roommate. End of story.

But despite this discipline he tries to impose on himself, Bellamy still feels a sudden surge of warmth when he helps Raven unpack her things in the afternoon. She is prickly and cranky, and clearly in a lot of pain from her wounds, but she seems determined to blame it all on period cramps, and Bellamy knows better than to call her out, not that he gets a chance. She’s a whirlwind of energy, and she keeps talking about the work she did with Monty as if it was some kind of test, or maybe like she’s talking over his silences, baiting him to interrupt, but he’s too tired to as much as ask a question.

Eventually she lulls him into a kind of half-sleep, his eyelids heavy even as his hands keep working on his gun, cleaning it and checking before he puts it away for the night, and this picture – a girl talking excitedly, her voice soothing around him as he does something he hates – is so familiar Bellamy acts on instinct. As soon as he’s done, he walks up to Raven, lifts his hand, and tries ruffling her hair, only to find it in a ponytail.

It begins a week of awkward touches; of small affections offered sleepily in the morning, and absent-minded caresses they fall into when they’re too tired to think. Maybe, Bellamy thinks, this comes simply from sharing a space, or from the way they sleep, fully clothed, but curled up into each other like they’re starved. He could easily get a separate bed for himself now, it’d take him no more than a few days, but for some reason, neither of them mentions it after the first night. It’s a kind of warmth that’s impossible to resist, especially compared to the violence they face outside their quarters, and so every night Bellamy buries his face in Raven’s hair, and barely swallows a sigh when his muscles start relaxing under her warmth. 

In a way, all this familiarity doesn’t sit right under his skin, because it feels like it should belong to lovers, and he doesn’t exactly _want_ her, not like this. Right now, sex feels like a strange thing, strained and far-removed, but at the same time, it’s like Raven moving in with him breaks a dam, and leaves him so thirsty for touch he could wrap himself around her for hours without needing to let go. His hands are chafed, and red, and swollen, and he can’t resist trying to make things right, fixing clothes or cleaning their room, or touching Raven in ways that are tender, that are good, and kind, and simple. 

He doesn’t fool himself that this is proper atonement, but for some twisted reason, sometimes it stops him from acting like he’s trying to get himself killed.

Most of the time, he tries to steer his attention towards her things, and not Raven herself; to taking care that they’re never low on firewood and water, or checking her clothes for tears. Raven, he learns, grows snappish if he touches her too much, but she always allows him to hold her to sleep, so he tries to stick to that, and focus on other things during the time they spend together.

So that’s how Miller finds them when he comes over on the fifth day of them living together: Raven at the table, stabbing a screwdriver into something with dedicated fury, and Bellamy on the cot, trying to make them a second pillow from scraps, so they stop squeezing themselves on just one.

“Stay away from the workshop tomorrow,” he tells Raven as soon as he sticks his head into their quarters. “Your ex will be there, looking over the greenhouse projects.”

“What?”

Her voice sounds like a punch to the gut, and suddenly Bellamy is on high alert, his eyes going from Raven to Miller and back as he looks for clues. Meanwhile, Miller sits on the cot next to him, careful not to disturbs the scraps he has set on the mattress, and shrugs.

“Griffin’s orders. Apparently the greenhouse is a priority project now, and it needs attention from a real engineer, not a bunch of kids. No offense.”

All taken, it seems, because Raven almost jumps out of her seat, ready to spew bile.

“Tell Monty to make copies before he hands over anything,” she spits out, determined to be mad. “If he mucks it up…”

“Come on, he won’t do shit, he’ll just sit there for three days and look important. It’s election fodder. I’m just giving you the heads-up so you guys don’t end up…” Miller stops when he notices the expression of utter bewilderment on Bellamy’s face. “Wait. You haven’t heard?”

***

Raven isn’t sure what Monty expected after sending Nate with that message, but she shows up the workshop first thing it the morning, as if the thought of bailing never crossed her mind. She does it, she tells Bellamy as they get ready, because Monty sure as hell isn’t a hundred percent yet, and it’s a horrible idea to have him discuss his ideas with a hostile stranger.

Right. That’s why.

In the end, the day is much less of an epic battle than she made herself expect. It’s more of a petty squabble, exhausting and annoying, except the more they sit over the plans, the more Raven feels like she’s the one who’s hostile, as if she came here to prove it to herself that she made exactly the right choice. Wick is wrong, wrong by definition, wrong about the greenhouse, and wrong about her, because anything else is unbearable; because someone needs to be the villain, and if it’s not him…

(Stubborn. Self-destructive. Selfish.)

She snaps at Bellamy when she comes back home, and when he doesn’t snap right back at her, she wants to shake him for real, or maybe fuck him against the wall until he gets over himself, and stops acting like she’s this fragile, injured creature in need of constant care, because she’s not, damn it, she’s not, and if he can’t see… 

She storms out and goes back to Monty’s empty workshop without a second thought, oblivious to the fact that it’s starting to rain. After five days between Wick’s accusations and Bellamy’s coddling, she feels like she is suffocating in her own head, his pity driving her up the wall, this was a mistake, and she’s trapped, she can’t fucking live with him. 

But she can pore over designs with a single bulb lit over her head, she can calculate solar panels and prove Wick wrong, she has to prove Wick wrong…

Bellamy shows up in the workshop late into the evening, and he looks a fright, face pale and hair dripping from the rain. For a second, Raven expects him to be furious with her, and she swallows, waiting for him to confirm what she already knows about herself.

“I couldn’t sleep,” is all he says. And then, “Find me something to do.”

Just like that, all the fight goes out of her. She wraps her arms around him tightly, and he accepts it without questions. He’s wet and cold, and about to make himself sick with this fucking weather, but he still strokes her hair like he thinks he understands, even though he can’t possibly.

“I’m sorry,” she mutters against his shoulder, not specifying just in case. He can choose what to be mad for.

“Don’t.”

It’s coarse enough that she can accept it, or maybe she’s just tired enough. Either way, she doesn’t let go. 

“We might not make it before the snow,” she manages. “The solars are the best we have, but if they aren't good enough… Wick says we won’t make it.”

He nods, letting her know he got the message, but doesn't offer anything in return. It's not like he can help her here, and it’s possible that neither can she.

She still ends up trying to explain the design to him, but isn’t even surprised when Monty shows up half an hour later, shortly followed by Miller with Harper, Octavia and Lincoln in tow. There isn’t really enough room for all of them to sit comfortably, but it doesn’t seem to bother them at all. Bellamy is quiet at her side, even though the conversation keeps circling around Miller’s news about the new Council, but at least his jacket dries quickly when he’s surrounded with this much body heat.

And maybe it does something for her, too.


	5. Wanting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiiiiiiii! Long story short -- real life happens to me a lot lately, and on top of that, this story turns out to be a lot more difficult to write than I expected. I keep rewriting my outline, keep struggling with the mood and with relationship dynamics. At this point, I'm not even sure if I'll have the skill to finish this, but for now, I keep fighting.

They return home hand in hand, and while they walk, Bellamy can’t resist sticking close to Raven, as if he didn’t have enough after that long hug they shared in the workshop, how very greedy of him. He still can’t decide if that fight they had before happened because she was mad at him, or simply because she was mad _around_ him, and he’ll probably never figure it out, since Raven isn’t the sharing type, not when it comes to anger. Raven, he knows by now, plays with her anger like it’s a bomb, throws it from one hand to the other, and watches it grow, lets things fester until they overflow and drown her whole.

So for once, he will be smarter than he usually is, or maybe braver, hard to tell. He will confront her and ask, and maybe give her a small lecture on the dangers of bottling up, based on his own very rich experience, because Bellamy Blake is nothing if not a hypocrite.

On the other hand, he probably won’t.

As they get ready for bed, he has a random thought about kissing her to sleep, and it must be his brain playing tricks on him, because seriously. There is nothing like _this_ between them, not now and not ever, apart from that one time they hardly ever talk about, because there is nothing to talk about. They didn’t really know each other back then, and now they’re friends, or something like, and that’s how it should be. He has no business kissing her, or thinking about kissing her.

And anyway, he is tired. This is just his brain playing tricks.

(If he kissed her now, he knows, she would leave him alone again.)

He’s sure it still shows in his touch that he remembers, and when he presses himself against Raven’s back, he has a very vivid memory of pushing her hair away from between her bare shoulder blades while his other hand caressed the small of her back. She wasn’t exactly whole at the time, but definitely less banged up, less pained and less tense, and maybe a little bit more hopeful.

As he’s thinking about hope, and realizing slowly that he remembers it like he would a fairy tale long gone, Raven surprises him by turning in his arms, and falling heavily on her back. She probably wanted to roll to her other side, then found that her leg won’t support her that far, because she twists her head towards him, determined to face him.

It’s stupid, of course it is, but Bellamy can’t resist, in this very moment, the poetry of Raven turning towards him just as he was thinking about hope. He shouldn’t even be allowed hope in the first place, but then, he shouldn’t be allowed comfort and company, either, and yet here it is. So he runs his hand up and down Raven’s side as if he was trying to soothe her to sleep, and he imagines she gives him a small smile, the kind he can’t really see in the dark.

What he can feel is that she starts moving again, and keeps it up until she’s positioned slightly above him. Before he can ask a single question, she leans over him to kiss his forehead, then lowers herself carefully to rest with her head on his chest.

“What was that for?” he asks quietly, as if worried someone could overhear.

“Nothing. Wanted to.”

It never occurred to him before that anything about them could be as simple as wanting.

When he gets out of bed in the morning, there is a lightness to him that wasn’t there just the day before; strange and precious, and shockingly familiar, as if it was something he used to feel, once upon a time. Things are finally coming together neatly, Raven’s greenhouse and Nate’s politics, and this weird tension he can feel when he meets O over breakfast.

“Heard you talk to Miller last night,” she says without an introduction. “Excited for the elections?”

“As much as you are. Pass me the spoon.”

***

To Raven’s credit, she fights for the greenhouse until the very end; fights like a lioness, and then she fights some more, until Monty puts his hand on her shoulder, and shakes his head quietly, making sure Kyle doesn’t notice. As if she needed any more reason to remember that, come hell or high water, she would go to war for Monty Green.

They end up retreating to Raven’s quarters soon after lunch time, ostensibly to give Wick space to look over the designs once more. In reality, Monty needs someone to brainstorm with before he can come up with proper containers to keep various seeds and saplings alive over the winter, and Raven knows that, regardless of who’s their next Chancellor, they’re going to need a proper smoke house, need a hunting schedule and proper storage, because if you believe Lincoln, and she does, winter is going to be rough even if they are well-prepared. Winter kills on the ground, and Raven will be damned if she lets another one of her people die.

It feels like defeat, but also it doesn’t – like her legs, and the weather, and all the other shit that’s been hitting her from the outside ever since she crashed here. It’s like the ground is determined to hate Raven Reyes, and Raven hates it back with all the ferocity she can muster, hates it so much that her fingers start working faster and faster, no glitches in sight. When Bellamy shows up, she barely spares him a glance, energized by this new project, and by how it won’t fail, can’t possibly fail, please, let something work out for her just once…

When Bellamy says “I gave back my uniform,” she almost misses it.

It’s Monty who reacts first; stares at Bellamy in disbelief, then laughs, actually laughs, and gets up to hug him. 

“Fucking finally,” he says as if this was a no-brainer; like anyone who cared about Bellamy at all would know right away that being a guard was something terrible for him, and that he should be cheered on for quitting it. It only hits her when she realizes that this is the first time since she moved in that he didn’t go straight to the table after coming home, and didn’t drop his gun there as if he couldn’t bear its weight at his belt. Right now, he isn’t carrying as much as an empty holster, and maybe it’s an illusion, but he seems a bit lost when he can’t repeat his usual evening routine.

Or maybe he isn’t lost. But when she extends her hand to him, he takes it and comes closer anyway.

“I’m supposed to join the team that scavenges the Ark for any parts the engineers might use,” he offers without being asked. “God, I thought Kane was gonna explode. What’s up with you guys? Why are you working here?”

“Wick infestation,” says Monty before Raven can choke out an answer. “And the greenhouse is a no go anyway. Not enough left from the Ark.”

Bellamy nods, and to Raven’s inexplicable relief, he doesn’t let go of her hand when he shifts slightly to the side to look at her haphazard sketches of various smokehouses. He seems tired; tired, and sad, and lost, despite the obvious relief he must be feeling. In the end, Raven simply squeezes his hand, as if trying to tell him that he’s going to be alright, they’re going to be alright; they’ll hunt and gather, and survive the winter, and come spring, they will build everything anew.

“We need more hunters,” is all she says with words, and he nods as if he was wearing a skin long gone, before he remembers that he doesn’t make decisions here anymore.

“You should talk to the Council,” he suggests after he weighs his words for a moment, and finds himself wishing for him to come closer, to touch her the way he does at night, except she can’t exactly ask him. Not with Monty around.

But she can whine “Tomorrow” when she thinks about presenting her new sketches to Abby, and it makes Bellamy smile indulgently.

“Yeah,” he agrees easily, her hand still in his. “Tomorrow. I’ve had enough Council for today."

When he leans to kiss her forehead, it feels like a milestone of sorts.


End file.
